The Rest Is Memory: A Novel

The heartbreaking story of a young Catholic girl transported to Auschwitz becomes a Rashomon-like rondo by one of our greatest novelists.Esquire • Best Books of Fall 2024"The Rest Is Memory is a literary resurrection, as shattering as it is astonishing. Lily Tuck has done the impossible; from darkness and hideous cruelty, she has woven an unforgettable paean to hope, to life, to justice." ―Junot Diaz First glimpsed riding on the back of a boy’s motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a small Polish village before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, and tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed. Three months later, she is dead.How did this happen to an ordinary Polish citizen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawa’s story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles who perished